Yeah, they're pretty gay

Picked up a pb copy of Shakespeare's Sonnets, which I have not read since my sophomore year in college more than half a century ago.

Read the first few this morning at Riverside Park, where I had parked under a tree to keep the car from roasting me alive.

Can't beat the elegance and facility of language of his poetry.

So completely unimaginable, now

The People, Yes

Interesting scale of values

"Blasphemers, perverts, and usurers" are punished as severely as murderers, as are suicides.

But flatterers, hypocrites, and thieves get it worse.

Reading Dante.

Even before the Renaissance

Inferno, Canto X.

Dante's contemporary references all seem so out of place in this work.

A pair of 13th Century Florentine Epicureans is introduced.

Were they actual atheists?

Did they believe, of the pagan gods, what Epicurus did?

What did they believe of the Christian God?

Four centuries before Gassendi and Hobbes.

Five before La Mettrie, Helvetius, and Holbach.

Canto VIII, Inferno

Filippo Argenti.

Odd that no one seems to castigate Dante for his personal pettiness.

Every disorder of the appetite they turn to sin

Canto 6, The Gluttons, the third circle.

Reading The Divine Comedy, Inferno.

John Ciardi.

The second circle was for people caught up in excessive erotic passion.

Dido, for example, and Helen.

No connection is asserted in these cantos to tie these appetitive extravagances in any necessary way to violations of the ten commandments, or indeed any others.

Or to tie them thus to harm to others.

The first circle was for unbaptized innocents, from infants to virtuous pagans.

People seen as morally quite OK.

Cuz why?

"Cause why? " in The Reeves Tale, v 293, means "Why?"

The Canterbury Tales.

Dylan's Nobel

Some reactions

The Miller's Tale

Ll 408 - 413.

'Now John,' quod Nicholas, 'I wod not lye;
I have y-found in myn astrologye,
As I have loked in the moone bright,
That now on Monday next, at quarter night,
Schal falle a reyn, and that so wilde and wood,
That half so gret was never Noe's flood.

To which the editor found it necessary to add a footnote.

God destroyed the world because of people's sins, but saved Noah and his family because he was faithful.

Canterbury Tales.

A rarely seen survival

Lief

Perfectly legit, standard, modern English, brought to mind by a passage in Chaucer.

The Miller's Tale, ll 432 ff,

Nicolas speaking of Noah to the carpenter, of his concern that his wife might survive the flood.

Him hadde wel lever, I dar well undertake,

At thilke tyme [at such a time - PV] than all his wetheres blake [black sheep - PV],

That sche hadde a schip hirself allone.

The Canterbury Tales.

The word is at least that old

The word "wake" is used twice within 2 lines concerning the funeral rites of Arcyte.

It is familiar in English and American literature and commonly used in New England, anyway, and in Ireland.

In my childhood, a wake was held at home for a dead great uncle, as I recall.

The body was in a coffin, food and drink were served, the rooms were full of smoke.

Catholic Canadian French in Spencer, Massachusetts.

So why is the word unfamiliar to people in the Pittsburgh region?

The Knight's Tale, 2082, 2084.

Canterbury Tales.

Theseus marries Emily to Palomon because he has earned it.

She loves him.

"Axe" for "ask"

The Knight's Tale, Canterbury Tales, line 487.

"Now loveres, axe I this question,"

Scotsman's English

Seems just like it.

The Knight's Tale.

The Canterbury Tales.

Chaucer

Your chances were probably better if you couldn't afford him.

The doctor/surgeon whose training and methods are described in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales.

Lines 411 - 444.

When did that change, I wonder?

In the last few days I have been lucky enough to obtain a fine, like-new but used, hard-cover copy of The Riverside Chaucer for $15 and a new Wordsworth paperback edition of The Canterbury Tales for $7, both beautiful books.

And bargains!

I have read the Tales before only in Modern English translation.

Not this time.

Novelty in literature

Besides his long and frequent digressions, his gassy sermons full of sentimental religion and morality, his bombast and relentless sentimentality, Hugo has occasional authorial interruptions, often of an explicitly biographical nature.

Postmodernism is not entirely new.

In some ways it is a return.

What would really be new in literature?

Some poet inventing meter.

Reading Les Miserables.

P.S.

Sentimentality aside, there is little more irresistible to Hugo than expounding, down to street level detail, the history and geography of Paris.

And there is a little of Mailer in Hugo, with his occasional celebrations of daring convict escapades, even apart from those of his central character, Valjean.

We see it as well in others of his works.

The Ring and the Book

Browning believes in Pompilia's innocence and her husband's guilt.

I believe in the guilt of both, but her adultery is no crime today, though it was capital then.

Half Rome may even have been right that the child was not Guido's.

Apparently, valid legal authorities at the time differed as to whether an enraged husband might spare the courts time, the executioner trouble, and the state expense.

Nothing in the poem thus far indicates whether Guido's faults as a brutal husband, at least - Pompilia accuses him as well of licensing his brother's raping her - , were ever recognized, and beating one's wife and marital rape may not have been crimes, then, at all.

I have read the poem before and I don't recall that ever being cleared up.

I have no idea why these Brits living in Italy took so much poetical interest in Italian family violence of earlier centuries against girl children - Pompilia was married off by her parents at twelve.

Think of Shelley and The Censi.

Reading Browning.

I note that many of the crimes that Islam commits today Christendom committed only yesterday.

Thank God for the Enlightenment.

So to speak.

About her parents, they seem to me a pair of confidence tricksters.

About the law of adultery and why it more peremptorily required chastity in wives than husbands see David Hume.

The Ring and the Book

The Count claimed she betrayed him and ran off with her priest paramour.

He found her and he killed her, her and her parents who abetted their crime.

The prosecutor insisted she was virtuous and fled a brutal husband.

He wad found guilty and the Pope rejected his appeal.

He was beheaded in Rome and his four accomplices, commoners, were hanged.

Had he convinced the Roman court of her infidelity, what would have happened?

Robert Browning.

Makes you want to learn Latin

Carpe diem.

Haven't read Horace in a very long time.

To his coy mistress.

To the virgins.

Le Feu du ciel

Fire from Heaven,  Les Orientales,  Victor Hugo, 1828.

Brilliant and awful.

Genesis, 19.

24. Alors le Seigneur fit descendre du ciel sur Sodome et sur Gomorrhe une pluie de soufre et de feu.

25. Et il perdit ces villes avec tous leurs habitant, tout le pays à l'entour avec ceux qui l'habitaient, et tout ce qui avait quelque verdeur sur la terre.

The Gutenberg Project has a horrible translation.